


Itching the Scratch

by badboy_fangirl



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-27 23:52:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badboy_fangirl/pseuds/badboy_fangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony and Ziva go to Paris!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Itching the Scratch

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for everything through 7x12 "Flesh & Blood" going AU with 7x13 "Jet Lag" and the trip to Paris.

Very Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo knows _that_ moment very well. The awkwardness that generally follows when he has to pull out and roll over--when he realizes he's just shared the most intimate thing he can with someone who is practically a stranger. It's happened to him a lot (not as many times as McGee thinks, but it's okay if he's misled McManorexic about his conquests, right?), just not much lately.

And right now, the awkwardness is not there, not at all, and he doesn't want to pull out and roll over, he wants to stay; he has this weird flash, and Jeanne runs across his memory, and he shakes his head, trying to dislodge the thought as he looks down into deeply brown eyes.

Suddenly, though, he's on his back, and she's flipped them both so that she's on top. She looks down at him with a slight smile on her lips, and then her fingers trail over his chest, caressing his skin through the smattering of hair over his pecs. It should be impossible--he's not as young as he used to be--but he can feel another erection growing, and then she shifts her hips a bit, and he marvels that she has managed to keep him inside her.

Why he marvels, he's not sure. It's Ziva, after all. And ninja moves are her specialty.

"Tony," she murmurs as her short nails flick his nipples enticingly.

"Yes?" he replies, unable to keep himself from arching into her. It's like a reflex, something buried inside of him that has always been pulled and pushed to and from her, like an ocean tide.

"I want to do this again," she states matter-of-factly, and then she moves on him in a much bigger way, her hips lifting and her inner muscles tightening with a precision he would attribute only to her.

"You're in luck," he says, though it's not very suave, considering he's gasping for oxygen as her movements make his eyes roll back in his head.

"This is _luck_?" she challenges, pivoting her hips again in an agonizingly amazing way. He should have known she'd be far better at this than even he, with his very fertile imagination, could have fathomed.

"Well, I am a 38-year-old man, you know," he chokes out self-deprecatingly.

His eyes pop open when she leans forward. Her hair spills over her shoulders to cocoon them together like Jake and Neytiri in _Avatar_. (So shoot him, he likes love stories disguised as ground-breaking special effects masterpieces.) "I have not noticed anything lacking," Ziva says, and her eyes search his so thoroughly, he wonders what she's looking for.

Her lips rub over his, and her eyes close, and he forgets for a few minutes how in _Avatar_ this was called mating, not just sex.

*

"Paris is considered one of the most romantic cities in the world. Why is that?"

Tony looks around, wondering that himself as he tugs his scarf closer around his ears. "Maybe it's the lights," he says, gesturing at the Eiffel Tower. He knows it's a significant landmark, and he is seeing it for the first time with a beautiful woman, but he's pissed at Gibbs for making them go to Europe--just him and Ziva. It wasn't the same as taking McWorld Traveler ("I went to Europe in college," Tim said, throwing a secret smile towards Gibbs. Tony's eyebrow had quirked and his eyes had sought Ziva's, who didn't look any more thrilled about it than he felt) with him across town to interrogate a person of interest while Tony and Ziva dug through financial records.

Europe is a sketchy jurisdiction for a military cop, and even though they'd ignored their boundaries many times, it is nothing more than busy work, and Tony knows it.

"There is our hotel," Ziva says, pointing to the left as she hooks her arm around Tony's elbow and pulls him towards it.

Ten minutes later, when the concierge informs them that an over-booking mishap has led to only one room being available, Tony would bet money that Gibbs is GOD and he controls the very fucking universe. (Of course, Ziva speaks French, and as she translates, he can feel his face growing hot as anger fills him up and then he hears Jack Nicholson in his head, "You can't _handle_ the truth!")

*

"Why, exactly, are you so grumpy?" Ziva asks after room service has brought them something that Tony isn't entirely sure isn't snails.

He gives her a look, and she just stares back at him with a blank expression. "Because, this is a lame assignment." He leaves it at that, because elaboration garners nothing.

"Tony, we are in France! Can you not enjoy it? It seems unlike you to be so..."

"What?" he prods when she trails off.

"It just seems like you would jump at the chance to slack off. Were you not riding a yoga girl like a horse last week when you were on protection duty? I am sure there is some French woman who would be very interested in itching that scratch."

He grinds his teeth, rubs the middle of his forehead with one finger, and grits out, "Scratch that itch. And besides, _we're_ ," he waggles a finger back and forth between the two of them, "sharing a room!"

"Pardon?" Ziva asks, her eyes darting up from her dinner plate as he stands up suddenly.

"The phrase is _scratching_ the itch, not _itching_ the scratch," he all but shouts.

Ziva's eyes are wide in her face, and she stares at him as he rounds the small table they've been sitting at so civilly.

"You are angry," she says, her tone somewhere between a statement of confusion and an incredulous accusation.

"It's been six months, Ziva. _Six months_ since I practically told you that I love you, and that I'd come all the way to Not-On-The-Map-Africa to get your sorry ass out of harm's way, and now here we are. _Here._ In the most romantic city in the world. On a job that's not even a _job_. And I think Gibbs is, I don't know, like, encouraging fraternization, which is breaking like twelve of his rules, no doubt, and if Gibbs is breaking rules, there must be a New World Order, and I just can't--"

She's pressed against him in a lightning fast move that doesn't surprise him so much as it scares the living shit out of him, but her face is stoic, and her hands rest on his ribs, her right one just below his gun holster when she says, "I did not think either of us was ready for that."

Tony tips his chin down, just slightly, wondering if he could ever be ready for any of it. Nobody could have prepared him for Ziva David, even if they'd tried, and certainly nobody ever had.

Tried, that is.

 _He'd_ never tried, except that one time, when he could blame it on a neuro-toxin that loosened his tongue and made things come out that might have been the truth, or could have just been the ramblings of a semi-drunk, concussed (he had been beaten, after all) NCIS agent who was in BFE-Africa about to get himself killed over a woman who had only ever kissed him because she was role-playing.

His partner. The most important person in his small circle of very important people.

Ziva's voice becomes softer when she utters (after such a long void of silence--a span of time that normally Tony DiNozzo would have been unable to let pass by without a banal anecdote or random movie quote that was somehow perfect for the situation), "Itching the scratch means, just this once, yes?"

Tony could correct her, _again_ , but good lord, is he expected to do everything all at once? While he debates that, one of her hands digs into his ribcage, and the other snakes up to grip the back of his neck, and she's kissing him (and it's better than he remembered), and she's aggressive, all tongue and teeth and dominance ( _exactly_ like he remembered, and dreamt about), and he's hard, and aching, and instantly all the irritation flows out of him and sexual desire swamps him, threatening to pull him into its murky depths like a rogue wave, washing him out to parts unexplored.

Possibly to never be recovered, ever again. Like _The Perfect Storm_.

*

It's in the dark, after they've made love _three_ times that she starts confessing things. He wonders if she would share so much if the light was on, or if she could see the asinine smile on his face, but he says nothing, just makes appropriate noises at the intervals she sets when she pauses. Her head rests against his shoulder, and they are so like every romantic comedy he's ever seen with the sheets tucked around them to preserve their modesty.

She tells him that she fell in love with him when he was falling in love with Jeanne Benoit. She also tells him that the realization of that made her hate him too, because it was not a smart thing, and if there was anything about her, it was that she tried to always do the smart thing. She tells him how so many times she intended to tell him the very opposite of what came out of her mouth, and how in Africa, she would lay in her cell and know that at any moment they would come to kill her, and she would have so many undone and unsaid things that killed her more than a bullet to her frontal lobe ever would.

But then when she'd seen his bloody and beaten face in that dank cell, all the anger she'd ever felt for him returned full force, because him risking himself (and Gibbs! and McGee!) was so stupid, she could not allow feelings of tenderness to overpower her desire to kill him herself, should they actually make it out alive.

He'd laughed then, quieting quickly when her fingers twisted the skin of his lower belly in retaliation.

"Ziva?" he says a few minutes later, when she doesn't continue with her state secrets.

"Yes, Tony?"

"From now on, we're itching the scratch, like all the time."

He feels her cheek plump up against his shoulder, and a small chuckle hits his collar bone. "Scratch away," she murmurs.

He knows then that not only does she understand this idiom, but Paris is, indeed, the most romantic city in the whole world.


End file.
